Miracles

Sometimes I wonder if life is simply what I make it?

Last February and really for the last thirty years I felt fragile.  I didn’t look fragile!  I looked massive and I had reasons.  I’ve always had bad feet and ankles.  My mother told me that when she special ordered high topped shoes for me at age three so I could keep wearing the baby shoes she put on all of us.  She had narrow feet and ankles and wanted to protect us. 

I’ve had a bad heart and trouble breathing for years too, but so did my mother and so does one of my siblings.  Of course they both smoked like chimneys.  I don’t.  I had other problems associated with being in our family and since they were inherited  I was exonerated!

I could ride my bike, but walking as a form of exercise was not a viable solution for me.  I turned into twice the woman I was before thirty before I began to make a slight change.  I started out walking five minutes a day and cutting down on the salt and calories.  Now I walk over an hour a day, lift weights and ride my bike a half hour.  I’m no longer diabetic, no longer have high blood pressure, and I’ve lost 65 pounds.  I still don’t look fragile, because I’m not!  I need to lose another 44 pounds, but I feel much better.

That all sounds pretty simple and straightforward.  Exercise, eat better, lose weight and feel better, but I think that is really not the way it happened.  It was more of a backwards process.  First I felt better then I was able to do the rest. 

All my life there have been conditions.  Conditions that were swaddled in good intentions and misinformation, but ones that made me feel like I was not enough or too much.  Even phrases like God isn’t through with me yet have a rather ominous underlying message that what is here isn’t good enough.  Add expectations or demands from family, friends and lovers to be who they want me to be or think I am and I, a desperate to be perfect and desperate to please you, type of person floundered.

I am sure none of these loving people meant for that to happen.  It was how they were brought up, what they knew and thought and believed.  It was who I was too.

Then I met a disembodied voice that slowly, over time, convinced me that I was perfect exactly the way I was!  I was smart enough, young enough, pretty enough, healthy enough, I was enough!  This voice convinced me that I was more than enough without changing one single thing.

Other people had said it, but I knew they didn’t believe it and neither did I.  It was believing it that made it possible for me to change everything.

Knowing something and believing it is the difference between science and miracles.  The magic comes with the belief.